Nick Penney

Whole

RISD MFA Thesis Project

May 2014

Whole is an interactive video game installation

Whole is a video game that I created in 2013 and 2014 for my MFA thesis project at RISD, which ran continuously behind a gallery wall at the Rhode Island Convention Center May 16—31, 2014.

The game served as an accompaniment to my written thesis, and was a ‘video game short story’: a proof-of-concept demonstrating the narrative and experiential potential of videos games as art. The visuals are a mixture of hand-drawn illustrations and collaged photography.

Whole runs on a custom-built 2D engine I developed in C++, using Qt for window management and I/O, and OpenGL for rendering and compositing. I also wrote a fully-featured level editor for the game.